Steam Impressions

I'm sure whatever royalties Valve has made off of our game so far are barely a single drop in their bucket, but I feel like I owe a lot to Steam. Besides being pretty open to indies (proclamations of the indiepocalypse notwithstanding), it has a handful of really useful tools for maintenance and promotion that I wouldn't have otherwise.

> Visibility Rounds: After the initial 1M "impressions" on the front page (see my Steam Launch postmortem) Steam offers five visibility rounds for major product updates, to the tune of 500K impressions. We've done two at this point: one for a new ship+minor patch, and the second during the exploration sale.

Since we weren't going to be on the front page, I was hoping the timing would tap into the increased traffic during the sale. However, the revamped front page removed the visibility round box, so the round didn't even complete until after the sale was over.

> Exploration Sale + Demo: This is the first major sale we participated in (at 50% off), and we coincided the release of the demo with its start. My theory was that the increased traffic from both the visibility round (which was a bust) and the demo (which gets onto the recent releases list) during the sale would convert more clicks into purchases.

> Cards / Coupons: You know those Steam Trading cards that you've probably been ignoring? Turns out that if you collect a set (which costs literally pennies), you'll get a coupon for a random game (between 33% and 90% off).  We only just realized how to opt-in, and went with the lowest frequency of drops (100/day) and discount (33%). Here are our stats for the first week:

I'll keep poking at it. What would be the drawback of having more drops? Seems like a free wider reach. Odd that the option was 100/day but we've only done 100/week. I'm inclined to bump up the discount too, but I'll wait to get a little more data at this level first.